Believing is Seeing

Greg Miller wrote that reading and viewing activity triggers mirroring, neuronal activity in regions associated with motor activity. That is, reading and acting share some of the same circuits.

In 1996, I referred to this collusion of thought and behavior, by conjoining the two words together: thought-behavior. It was inspired by Buddhist, philosophy of mind, and a bit of Robert Anton Wilsonesque weirdness. Think about it. There is no subjective difference between thought and behavior except in the degree of activity.

But that's oversimplifying the matter and leads to gross assertions, such as Greg Miller's heart-pounding conjecture: "Read an Ian Fleming novel, and your brain may be preparing to pull the trigger every time James Bond has a villain in his sights."

What's absurd about this notion is the lack of recognition that imagination is separate from acting. Whether through lack of complete circuit activation or through inhibitory circuit activation, imagination and activity are not confused. Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not preparing the reader to become a mechanic, nor is reading Cryptonomicon preparing the reader to become a cryptographer. Entertainment fiction is just that: entertainment.

I do find the topic of belief and behavior closely related. Daniel Bryant related to me an experiment in which subjects faced a blank wall in a semi-dark room. The subjects were told to imagine a banana on that wall. So they did. What they were not told was that a banana was gradually projected onto the same wall. The subjects did not notice this banana. The conclusion of the experiment was that the same regions of the brain for imagination and vision were firing.

From this speculation may be made that the consciousness is programming its lower brain, the lizard brain or some other ancestrally primitive portion of the brain that has a more visceral connection to the senses.

This would validate ritualistic visualization. When a yogi visualizes a chakra, his senses are being told: There is a chakra in my body; it is radiating light. Respond accordingly. When a Western Magickian visualizes a vibrant blue pentagram that keeps demons at bay, a part of the lower order brain may be receiving orders to sense such a pentagram.

As opposed to sensation from the environment, the visceral regions of the brain are being triggered by conscious behavior. Neurolinguistic programmers have been taking advantage of this for decades. Western Magickians have been taking advantage of this for centuries.

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